Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group (“CTF”) is a renowned jewellery company founded in 1929. With more than 90 years heritage, it is widely recognised for its trustworthiness and the authenticity of its high-quality products. Over the years, Chow Tai Fook has grown its retail network across Greater China, and into Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and the United States. To continue growing in today’s changing marketplace, CTF has been developing e-commerce businesses, and establishing an online-to-offline (“O2O”) strategy. To accomplish these tasks, CTF decided to modernise their infrastructure with cloud technologies to cope with today’s omni-channel retail environment.
The struggle between on-premises or going cloud
CTF was planning to refresh their data centre and revamp their virtual infrastructure. With the Group’s O2O strategy, it has come to own numerous public-facing web applications, including e-shops, corporate and business websites, and e-auction platforms, on over 90 virtual machines (“VMs”).
CTF invited HKT to help them analyse and study their inventory, with a deep dive into the dependencies between apps. HKT suggested a complete Amazon Web Services (“AWS”) solution, covering network design to infrastructure and applications, with the overall aim of delivering a better user experience with simpler IT management.
As its first step to cloud, HKT designed CTF’s onboarding journey to cloud with AWS Landing Zone, helping CTF to set up a secure AWS environment based on AWS best practices quickly, that saved a significant amount of time for CTF to get started with its migration.
Ahead in the cloud with innovations
With the Five Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework, CTF’s web apps are deployed with AWS CloudFront and Elastic Load Balancer, to enhance application availability and performance. Security policies with AWS GuardDuty and AWS WAF are also deployed to ensure application security with data logging. Together with AWS Lambda, unnecessary workloads are turned off automatically during non-office hours. Hence, CTF can maximise its cost-efficiency with better user experience on its websites, and secure data protection.
Apart from EC2 workloads, CTF has also deployed its e-auction app on Kubernetes, which is a container deployment that allow CTF to build and launch its app with quick and easy rollouts without downtime. Going serverless can also ease the IT management of CTF’s team for more resources to be allocated on business development.
Leveraging private connection and AWS Direct Connect as their primary connection, a secondary connection is also deployed for their circuit redundancy and security, in a cost-effective way to save monthly operation costs. The entire migration is expected to be completed in phases within 12 weeks.
Continuous cloud journey with managed services
HKT worked hand in hand with CTF’s Information and Communication Centre, to plan and prepare for their cloud adoption with application enhancements or refactoring. HKT also built the cloud architecture framework for the upcoming newly built app to be deployed on AWS.
But our HKT services didn’t stop there. HKT also provides on-going managed services for CTF’s optimisation and enhancement on the Cloud. We established resource monitoring with customised alerts with the AWS CloudWatch Dashboard, and 24x7 support from the ISO-certified operations team with a clear escalation path for CTF.
We also provide regular cloud architecture and security reviews, together with cost optimisation reports and resource tagging to let CTF understand the expenses for each of their applications.
Patrick Tsang, General Manager of Information and Communication Centre, Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group said, “HKT played a key advisory role in this transformation project. With cloud adoption, our platform is on-demand and reliable, which enabled us to enhance our customer experience of applications in a quick and easy way.